


and there where it spilled, clusters of grapes are growing

by Aesoleucian



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Gen, Pesach | Passover, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-22
Updated: 2018-04-22
Packaged: 2019-04-26 09:07:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14398833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aesoleucian/pseuds/Aesoleucian
Summary: There is probably no reason for Lemony Snicket to be eternally hiding from everyone and pretending to be dead. Let him get slightly drunk and sing off-key songs about goats. Please. Let him be happy.





	and there where it spilled, clusters of grapes are growing

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the reason I wrote this was being incredibly frustrated with the new TV show for making every character EXCEPT the Baudelaires and the Snickets Jewish, which is precisely the reverse of the canonical truth. Part of it is that I can't resist sad men with intimacy trauma learning to love again.
> 
> The title is a quote from 'The Master and Margarita' by Mikhail Bulgakov. This is the only literary reference I will explain outright.

I do not consider myself a participant in stories. Certainly a narrative could be made of my life, but it would be so upsetting that I cannot imagine why anyone would—and it would not be a story, just a collection of awful happenstances. No, I consider myself a chronicler of the stories of others. When you have the pleasure of knowing as many interesting people as I have, this is not such a hardship. But it did mean that I was taken by surprise when I found myself confronted by the subjects of my latest and dearest chronicle—as late and as dear to me as their mother.

It was late at night, and I was packing my small number of possessions hurriedly into a suitcase. This was not because I did not want to see the Baudelaires, but because after decades of being pursued by those who wish me harm I tend to assume that those who are pursuing me wish me harm. If I had been given the opportunity to avoid the Baudelaire siblings, though, I confess I would have taken it. It does not do for a chronicler to be researched by the subjects of his chronicle, any more than it would do for a famous dancer to give up dancing and attempt to write a biography of a ballet critic. One simply assumes she has better ways to use her time.

The door opened just as I slammed my suitcase shut. I heard someone take a single step into the room as I flicked the clasps closed, and I was halfway out the window before I heard a voice saying, “Mr. Snicket! Wait!”

There are many people who will ask you to wait over the course of your life. Hopefully a significant fraction of them will be trying to make sure you do not leave the house without your keys, the theater without your wallet, or a hotel without the coded message you left on the table in your haste to flee. But many will be asking you to wait so that they can capture you, or so that you will miss the swiftly closing window of opportunity to save the love of your life from a terrible fate. I have encountered the latter much more often, and so usually when someone says “Wait!” I run faster. But in this case it was not the voice of the local authorities or one of my many enemies. It was the voice of a young girl.

I stopped halfway out of the window of opportunity, and then slowly looked over my shoulder at the person who had spoken. I recognized her from the many newspaper clippings, candid photographs, posed photographs, audio recordings, and sketches I had encountered in the course of my research. It was Sunny Baudelaire.

“I’m afraid I have to go,” I said.

“Please wait,” said her elder sister, Violet. She took another step into the room, and although I was still poised on the sill of the literal window of opportunity I could feel the figurative window of opportunity closing swiftly in front of me.

It is terribly rude to jump out a window when someone is addressing you, especially if they do not intend to capture, incapacitate, or kill you. The figurative window of opportunity slid shut, and I slowly withdrew from its literal counterpart to stand in the room where the four Baudelaire siblings had found me. It was difficult to look at their faces, but I did, unwilling to miss any detail. They were several years older than the last time I had seen photographs of them, which was in a newspaper article entitled SCIONS OF BAUDELAIRE FORTUNE RETURN TO CLEAR THEIR NAME. Knowing their birthdays, I was aware that Violet was twenty-one, Klaus twenty, Sunny eight, and the young girl who must be Beatrice six years old. When I wrote about them I felt a sense of pride in their accomplishments, their maturity, and the fact that they had survived the terrible events in their lives at all. But in person I felt embarrassed to have entertained such proprietary emotions toward people I had never met. I said, “You will be better off if you walk away from here now. You will be better off if you forget you ever saw me.”

“You don’t know that,” said Klaus.

“Unless you can see the future,” Sunny added.

“I can only guess the future,” I said. “But it seldom brings anything but misery to be acquainted with me.”

“I thought you’d be happy to see us,” said the six-year-old girl holding onto Klaus’ and Sunny’s hands. “Aren’t you my uncle L?”

I could not in good conscience ignore such a question, and although I am not sure I even possessed a good conscience at that point I set my suitcase down on the table, opened it, and said, “Would you like some tea?”

“Yes,” said Violet, at the same time as Klaus said, “What?”

I held up my well-travelled electric kettle and a canister of tea leaves. “I don’t have any sugar, I’m afraid. And anyway, I believe tea should be—”

“As bitter as wormwood,” said Sunny, with an air of long familiarity that made me nervous.

“And as sharp as a two-edged sword,” said Violet. “We know.”

“Of course you do,” I mumbled. I turned my back on them to fill the kettle from the bathroom sink. When I looked around again Beatrice was standing on a chair to look through my suitcase. “Please don’t touch that,” I told her.

“I was just looking for cups.”

I leaned around her to remove the stack of tin cups from my suitcase, remove the pair of socks rolled up inside of them, and put them on the table. “How did you find me?”

Beatrice pouted, and I looked away from her, but it was Klaus who answered. “You aren’t the only one who is good at research, Mr. Snicket. Given the number of enemies following you, there is a lot of information on your whereabouts for someone who knows the right places to look.”

I knew this already, as it was the only logical conclusion to come to when my enemies kept finding me. But it did not make me any less nervous.

“Please don’t be anxious,” said Sunny.

“Actually,” I said, “I am nervous. The water is boiling.”

“I’ll get it,” said Violet, and stood up. Deprived of my escape, I folded my hands tightly in my lap to prevent myself from fidgeting, which is at best impolite and at worst a tell that can be used by one’s enemies to divine one’s intentions. “We don’t mean to make you nervous, Mr. Snicket,” she said. “It’s just that after having been chased for so long by wicked people it was comforting to think we had more family somewhere.”

I did not find it comforting any longer to think that I had family somewhere, and not just because every member of my family was dead except the young girl who was climbing up onto the sole other chair in my hotel room. It was because family members die when you do not want them to, even when you do your utmost to protect them, even when you fake your death and spend twenty years furtively having them tailed to make sure they cannot be caught by surprise. To have family is to fear perpetually their loss.

Perhaps because I did not reply, Violet said, “We have many wonderful and noble friends, but it seems that you don’t have anyone.”

“Everyone should have someone,” said Sunny.

I have spent a great deal of my life weeping, and you might think that this would inure me to it, a phrase which here means “make it so I could not cry any more.” But crying is not like certain chemical substances that decrease in effectiveness with each dose. It is more like priming a pump, a practice in which water is poured inside to make it easier to pump more water up. The numerous times I have wept for all the tragedy and horror in the world only primed the pumps of my tear ducts, and made it easier to do so again. And now, thinking of my lost parents, lost siblings, lost friends and associates, and the many lost libraries I have seen burned to the ground, I began to weep again. For this reason I was unable to explain that a person like me should not have someone, no matter how much he wants to, and I instead suffered the comforting arm Violet put around me without speaking. Beatrice took one of my hands, and Klaus the other, and I could hear Sunny shaking tea into the kettle. Being held while you are crying is one of the few things that make it a little better to be upset, humiliated, and covered in salty water. I had not experienced it since the last of my associates to know I was still alive witnessed my third faked death. It was a great comfort to me now, and even more comforting was the fact that none of them mentioned it. When I sat up I found a cup of tea and a small pile of tissues on the table in front of me, and the Baudelaire siblings were quietly trying to deduce the identity of the tea, which was in an unmarked tin, pretending they could not see me.

“I don’t know what type it is either,” I murmured at length. “When I received it, it was in a bag labelled in Vietnamese, and I did not have a chance to translate it before I had to move the contents of the bag in order to fill it with vital information instead.”

“It’s very good,” said Violet. “Perhaps you can ask the person who gave it to you.”

I could not, because that person was dead, but because I thought the Baudelaires had had enough news of death I did not say so. I said, “What was your intention in coming here?”

“Come live with us!” said Beatrice. “We’ll protect you. And you can have friends again. It will be nicer than being on the run.”

“I must decline. I would rather not bring trouble to your happy yet regrettably flammable house.”

“Violet has invented a new type of fireproof material,” said Klaus. “So actually our house is not very flammable at all.” I knew this, in fact. Hidden in a hollow tree several miles away in one of my small personal libraries was the article from a scientific journal in which she had announced it.

“Some fires are metaphorical,” I said.

“We are willing to take that risk,” said Violet firmly. “You are family, and if it makes you safer we are all willing to accept a little more danger.”

I had no reply to that.

 

The new Baudelaire house was much smaller than their parents’ mansion; as Violet explained, it only needed to be large enough to host parties for close friends, and there were other uses for money that the siblings found more pressing. I looked around the entryway, which opened onto the kitchen, feeling out of place in a house I had not had to sneak into. Violet vanished into another room, where I could hear her dialing a telephone, and the other three siblings led me upstairs to a guest room.

“I hope you will be comfortable here,” said Klaus, looking almost as uncomfortable and awkward as I felt. “If there’s anything you need, just ask. I can… show you the library if you want.”

“I would like that very much.”

I left my suitcase on the pristine bed and followed him downstairs again, feeling exposed and nervous without it. As we walked, Beatrice’s hand found mine, and I wanted to weep again at the ease of her touch. She did not let go even after Klaus and Sunny excused themselves from the library. She stood with me while I ran my other hand over the spines of the books, which were organized by the Library of Congress system. She stood with me while I picked out a volume on ancient botany, and tugged at my hand until I sat down in a chair, leaving her to perch on the arm.

“Will you read to me?”

“What do you like to read?” I asked.

She tilted her head in a way terribly like my sister used to when she was trying to understand why someone had asked a question. “Read me the book you wanted. You can get to know people by finding out what they like to read. Um, but I really like to read about insects and other arthropods. Klaus got me an Audobon guide last year.”

“You’re in luck, then. There’s an entire chapter in this book about citrus ants.”

Beatrice squirmed and leaned over to look at the table of contents. “No, read it from the beginning.”

And so I began to read. My voice was out of practice, because I seldom spoke above a furtive mutter any more, and my throat quickly began to grow dry. I did not ask for a glass of water, though. I did not want to disturb the peaceful atmosphere. But Beatrice seemed to notice, and asked if she could read some of it. She was slower, and had trouble pronouncing some of the words, but she was very confident. I lost myself in discussions of floating gardens and the economics of herb cultivation, and I was very startled indeed when someone said from the doorway, “Sunny says dinner is ready.”

I tensed and turned my head just enough to see Klaus standing there. Beatrice pressed a bookmark into my hand before sliding off the arm of the chair, and I realized I had been unconsciously searching for my suitcase. If you have ever been in a desperate situation for many weeks, months, or years at a time you may know that it is useful to train yourself to be jumpy, a word which here means “paranoid and ready to flee at a moment’s notice.” Unfortunately, it is difficult to train yourself out of being jumpy. If you ever, by some miracle, make your way to a safe place, you will still find your heart racing at unexpected noises and your hand clenching around the place where you think the handle of your suitcase should be. I must regretfully inform you that this will persist long after you cease being pursued, surprised, and attacked by unsavory people. If you have been without friends and allies for a prolonged period of time you may find it difficult to trust anyone, as I found it difficult to trust the Baudelaires, although I knew they were among the most trustworthy people in the world. If you have spent many years disguising yourself every time you go out, you may feel nervous and exposed when all you have to present to the world is your own face. If you have moved frequently from hotel to hotel or slept often in the trunks of cars and odd corners of train stations, you may find yourself automatically assessing the exits of a building or getting nervous in open spaces with no obvious place to hide.

I did my best to hide my jumpiness as I placed the bookmark in the book we had been reading, closed it, and stood up. As I followed Klaus into the kitchen I wondered whether the Baudelaires still felt the same jumpiness. If they did, none of them showed it. Sunny and Violet smiled at me as I entered the kitchen, while Beatrice jumped up into a chair.

“I made comfort food,” said Sunny. “Bon appetit!”

I sat next to Beatrice. I was sure the Baudelaires could see how jumpy I was, but they were far too well-mannered to say anything about it. “I’m surprised that you regard pasta puttanesca as a comfort food,” I said, accepting a plate of it from Violet.

Sunny tilted her head in a way that was so like Beatrice that I wondered who had gotten the gesture from whom. “Pasta puttanesca is easy to make and has a pleasant texture and flavor,” she said. “And it was what got me interested in cooking. Despite where we were living, I still think of it as a happy memory.”

“You were researching us,” Klaus murmurs, twirling pasta onto his fork.

I felt I had somehow betrayed them, even though the reasons for my research were noble and it had been finished long before we met. “You researched me,” I said. It was no excuse, but I said it as if it were one. “I am so sorry that I was never able to catch up to you.”

“But you did,” said Violet. “Outside of Hotel Denouement. I thought you seemed familiar when we found a picture of you and your siblings, and when I made the connection I realized you weren’t as dead as everyone seemed to think.”

“I’m always astonished by how good your memory for faces is, Violet,” said Klaus. I bowed my head and began to eat pasta puttanesca, thinking that anyone else could have seen me and made the same connection. I had never had Sunny’s cooking before, as often as I had written about it, and it was even better than I had imagined.

The Baudelaires did not try to engage me in their conversation, although I imagined they must have questions. How much had they been able to find? How long had they been looking for me? I considered these questions as I listened to them talking about their plans for the next few days. I learned that every Friday night they or one of their friends hosted a dinner, and that tomorrow they would be going to the Quagmire house. I learned that Sunny planned to buy a great quantity of jam and make a great number of cookies, and that I was welcome to help. I learned that one of Violet’s current projects involved fireproofing a new underground headquarters and that she would be away for the weekend. I learned that Klaus was a volunteer in more ways than one, and spent his time organizing libraries both secret and public as well as working at shelters in the city. It reminded me that I would need to change my own habits in order to continue volunteering without endangering this peaceful house. This peace, although it must have endured for several years already, felt very fragile to me, as if it might shatter at any moment.

Sunny broke the thread of my thoughts by presenting tiramisu, a trifle made with sponge cake, coffee, rum, and pastry cream; and toffee, an extremely crunchy candy. I smiled as I watched her enthusiastically biting down on the toffee. It seemed that even though all her teeth had grown in she still loved to eat crunchy foods.

Beatrice made a sandwich by putting some cream-covered sponge cake between two pieces of toffee, and predictably got food everywhere. Her siblings laughed, and Violet said she would help Beatrice clean up.

 

A peculiar thing about being unable to trust anyone for a long time is that you may begin to ascribe your paranoia to others, a phrase which here means “you won’t understand how anyone could trust you either.” I was extremely surprised when none of the elder Baudelaire siblings objected to Beatrice’s idea that I should walk her to school. Violet even said she thought it would be good for Beatrice to spend more time with her uncle. None of them objected when I excused myself to hurry upstairs and put on a disguise. None of them objected as Beatrice took my hand and led me outside. Sunny waved at me, but I was too anxious to wave back. I was afraid that I would expose Beatrice to danger simply by being there. If I had been anyone else, perhaps this would be an irrational fear, but thirty years’ experience had proven that it was very rational indeed to fear that my presence would endanger those I loved.

I could not help but love Beatrice, even having known her for only one day. She trusted me so readily that I could not even consider betraying that trust without feeling slightly nauseated.  But there are many ways to betray someone’s trust, and I knew that eventually I would perpetrate one of them.

“When we are outside,” I said quietly to Beatrice, “I would like you to refer to me by a pseudonym.”

“A fake name?”

I was not happy that my six-year-old niece already knew what a pseudonym was, but I nodded. “I am not your uncle. I am a family friend named Eustace d’Alleman.”

“I’m still going to call you uncle, though,” said Beatrice. “I have a lot of uncles and aunts. I have Uncle Duncan and Uncle Quigley and Uncle Fern and Aunt Izzie and Auntie Strauss and Aunt Fiona and…”

I listened carefully to her list of family friends. Almost all of them were names I recognized, and I could probably expect them to be at dinner tonight. She asked me about my favorite types of insects, and I told her that for historical reasons I am very fond of locusts. I asked hers, and she told me about the strange life cycle of the fig wasp.

“Will you come pick me up when school is over?” she asked as we stood on the sidewalk near the main entrance.

“If your siblings will permit it.”

“They’re not going to be home. Sunny takes a really long time shopping. So can you come pick me up at 2:30?”

“All right.”

I waved goodbye to her and walked back to the Baudelaire house alone. As Beatrice had said, it was empty. If I were going to flee, this would be the time to do it, while all four of my hosts were otherwise occupied. But I did not want to betray their trust. It had been a very long time since I had somewhere safe—even marginally safe—to stay. It had been a very long time since I had a whole day to myself with a large and unburned library.

Nevertheless I was compelled to check the house for secret passages first. When I did not find any, I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or frightened for the Baudelaires. If—when—there was a fire, I hoped they would be able to get out safely.

I spent the rest of the morning in the library reading the newest series of coded encyclopedias. When the grandfather clock in the library chimed twelve I considered scavenging for food in the kitchen. I also considered it at one o’clock, and at two o’clock. I did, in the end, bring a roast beef and horseradish sandwich with me as I walked toward Beatrice’s school. It was a very beautiful day for early March, not too chilly and with the sun shining brightly. A few birds were chirping in the trees, and everything around me felt like a premonition of doom.

I felt out of place lurking near an elementary school, like one of the suspect men one sees in warnings to keep an eye on one’s children. I did not think I was imagining the suspicious glances from other parents waiting there. But I was used to be considered suspect by those around me. I leaned against a wall and waited for the bell to ring, and then I searched the crowd of children for my niece. She was one of the last people to come out of the building, and she began looking around for me. So although attracting anyone’s attention went against my every instinct I waved to her.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I was talking to my teacher. We can go now.”

She took my hand again as we walked back to the house, and told me what she had learned in school that day. In return I practiced good listening etiquette, which means that I nodded where appropriate and asked clarifying questions, both to make sure I understood and to make sure Beatrice knew I was interested in what she had to say.

The moment the door closed behind us she paused, looking thoughtful. Then she began to take off her shoes and coat and said, “You know lots and lots of cool stuff, Uncle Lem.” I briefly felt like someone had reached under my ribs and squeezed my heart tightly, because nobody had called me Lem since the last time I saw my brother. “I’ll see you in a couple days, Lem,” he had said to me, and gave me a hug. He did not see me in a couple days. He never saw me again—nor did my sister, and no-one called me by my family’s nickname for me for the next twenty-four years. “Can you teach me some things?” Beatrice asked.

“Certainly,” I said softly, and began again to take off my own coat, as well as the hat and fake moustache I had been wearing. “What would you like to learn?”

“There are lots of things that Violet, Klaus, and Sunny won’t tell me,” she said. “They won’t tell me what V.F.D. really is. Sometimes they talk to strange people and they won’t tell me who those people are. Sometimes they work on projects they won’t tell me about.”

I sighed. “Like their own mother, who you were named for, your siblings believe that young children should not have to bear the responsibility of repairing the world. I was given an opportunity to do so when I was eleven years old, and I foolishly took it. I was far too young to see what I saw, and to do what I did. None of us wish that fate on you.”

“Sunny’s only two years older than me,” said Beatrice. She had my sister’s pout, although Kit had not used it in seriousness since she was ten years old.

“Has Sunny told you how much she suffered because of that information?” From Beatrice’s expression I could tell she had not. “Your siblings would rather forget what happened to them. If, as a child, you ever find yourself in a desperate situation for a prolonged period, it will affect you for the rest of your life. A year is so much longer for you than for me. The first two years I was a volunteer affected me more deeply, I think, than the remaining thirty-two.”

Beatrice was silent and solemn for a moment, looking out the tall window on the side of the front door into the front garden. “Everyone treats me like a baby. I’m not just six, I’m an, an exceptionally well-read and resourceful six-year-old.” She had a little difficulty pronouncing the longer words, but I imagined that her siblings had been reading to her since she was born.

“It is not my decision to make, whether to tell you their story,” I said. “But I will teach you how to protect yourself in case your family’s enemies find you.” Beatrice’s whole face brightened, and I turned away toward the kitchen. “Do you want a snack first? I didn’t have very much lunch.”

It is one of the great tragedies of human existence that many children in safe homes want to grow up faster than is healthy for them, while children in dangerous homes or with no home at all are forced to grow up early and bitterly regret it. It is a choice between frustration—a type of temporary emotional pain—and a much more lasting emotional pain. Children should not have to make this choice for themselves, and yet many of them do due to neglectful guardians, unforeseen circumstances, or foreseen but inevitable circumstances.

And so I taught Beatrice the most benign skill I could think of that might one day save her: climbing trees. When I was younger I found the transition to escaping through bathroom windows and scaling the sides of tall buildings to be easier because I had practiced climbing the trees in my parents’ large garden.

Sometime during the afternoon I heard Klaus calling from inside the house, “We’re home!” Beatrice jumped away from the low wall she had been trying and failing to climb for ten minutes and ran inside, so I followed. Klaus and Sunny were putting grocery bags on the kitchen counters and beginning to sort through them. One entire bag was filled with jars and jars of jams, jellies, preserves, and pastes. There were lemon, grapefruit, apricot, pear, apple, orange, peach, quince, redcurrant, raspberry, rhubarb, strawberry, plum, blueberry, boysenberry, blackcurrant, and poppy seed preserves, which I helped Sunny take out of the bag and line up in order of how dark they were. The bag Klaus and Beatrice were emptying contained other food items such as fresh vegetables and a loaf of pumpernickel rye.

“Our parents used to make these cookies with us,” said Klaus, as he reached up to get brown sugar from a high shelf in a cabinet. “I thought we must have tried every flavor of jam in the world, but we managed to find a few new ones.”

Beatrice and I watched while Sunny quickly measured and mixed a huge quantity of cookie dough, and then Klaus helped her roll it out on the counter before offering her a glass to use to separate the dough into circles. “Have you washed your hands?” Sunny asked. Beatrice slid off her stool and went to do so, and Sunny pushed a few of the circles and a pile of spoons toward me. “You make these by putting a small spoonful of jam in the middle and folding over the edges of the circle into a triangle. Then you can tuck them under each other, like this. It helps the cookies hold together while they’re being baked.”

“I have made them before,” I told Sunny as I unscrewed the top of the jar of poppy seed paste, which has always been my favorite.

“Did our parents teach you?” Klaus asked.

“No. Mine did. They aren’t unique to your family, you know. Have you heard the story of how they were invented?” Klaus and Sunny shook their heads, so I began. “Much like your own story, it concerns a very wicked man who wanted to accrue power and money at the expense of noble people…”

 

In the end there were far too many cookies for five people to eat, even in a month, and so as the sun drew closer to the horizon, and as Violet returned from talking with a manufacturer of mechanical parts, we stacked the cookies on a large decorative plate and took it to Violet’s automobile. When I realized that we were, at that moment, about to leave for the Quagmire house, I rushed inside again to retrieve the disguise I had used earlier that day.

Violet frowned at me in the rear-view mirror as I shut the door. “Mr. Snicket, you don’t have to disguise yourself for this. It will be a gathering of close friends, all of them volunteers.”

“My name is Eustace d’Alleman, but I will forgive you this time because it is an easy mistake to make. And any gathering, no matter how private, carries the opportunity to be recognized. You told me yesterday that you were willing to assume the risk of taking me into your home. Allow me to return the favor and reduce that risk as much as possible.”

Violet nodded her head once, looking uneasy, and began to drive in silence. I had not told her all the reasons I was going in disguise, however. It is risky to appear at a semi-public gathering, and volunteers are notorious for sharing information widely and quickly. But the other reason is something you may understand if you have ever had to do a difficult and unfamiliar task in a stressful situation. Perhaps you had to prepare a meal for a very important man who could either decide to kill you or spare your family’s lives, and you told yourself that it was just like making dinner with your uncle. Perhaps you had to perform brain surgery in a barn with only basic veterinary training, and you told yourself that saving your friend’s life was just like splinting a raccoon’s broken leg. In my case I was preparing to make polite and possibly witty conversation with a small gathering of pleasant people whom I could trust, an activity so difficult, unfamiliar, and stressful that I needed to tell myself I was doing something I knew well. I decided to treat this dinner party as an infiltration by going in disguise and trying to gather information that would tell me if the Baudelaires’ friends were really trustworthy. I have infiltrated a great many dinner parties in my life, and I assured myself that this one would be no different from the others. I was not counting on the other guests to be genuinely interested in me.

My normal modus operandi, a phrase which here means “way of doing things,” was to blend in and stay near the walls, and if all else failed to act as if I had just heard someone in another room calling my name. This gathering was much too small to use my normal modus operandi, consisting of only twelve people other than myself. None of them had ever met me, and seemed to accept that I was a family friend and bookbinder by trade. But Quigley Quagmire clasped my hand in his for a long time, looked at me with searching eyes, and murmured, “You remind me of someone I once knew, sir.”

“I hear that often,” I said in Eustace d’Alleman’s breathy voice. “Just one of those faces, I suppose.”

“I wonder if you met him,” said Quigley softly. “His name was Jacques. He looked remarkably like you.”

“If you value his memory at all, please share this speculation with no-one,” I said, and extricated my hand from his. “Very pleased to meet you, Mr. Quagmire. Shall we take our seats?”

To my dread, Quigley sat next to me. On my other side was Beatrice, and across the table was the hook-handed man, Fernald, sans his sister. I gathered that she was several weeks into a mycological expedition, and would not be expected until late March.

The other guests at the dinner party were scintillating conversationalists, but they did not quite have the discretion of the Baudelaires, a phrase which here means that they never entirely left me well enough alone, and kept trying to engage me in conversation about how the book-binding business was going. I had come prepared with a great many dull facts about bookbinding, but unfortunately there were several librarians in the company with an interest in book restoration, and I found myself talking at length about some of the more interesting specimens I had rescued from basements, sandbars, and mountain caves. At one point an archivist named Hal—the very man you might remember the Baudelaires met just under seven years earlier in the basement of half a hospital—traded seats with the young heiress to the Winnipeg duchy so that he could solicit suggestions for a restoration process that would be easier for blind bookbinders. I must confess I quite forgot myself. It had been so long since I was able to hold forth on a topic that I loved for the benefit of such a rapt audience.

“That’s a trick I learned a few years after I joined,” I was saying. “Not from my chaperone, of course. She was worse than useless most of the time.” And then I paused, trying to determine from Hal’s expression whether he was suspicious of me. But his face was inscrutable. I glanced at Fernald next to him, who was only paying attention to a friendly argument with Violet on the construction of nuclear submarines. Quigley, beside me, seemed to be listening attentively to the heiress. Perhaps I was safe after all.

“Your chaperone?” asked Beatrice. “Who was she? Why did you need a chaperone?”

“Please don’t interrupt when other people are talking, Beatrice,” I said.

“But you weren’t talking! You were just sitting there staring at Uncle Fern!”

“I was gathering my thoughts. Excuse me.”

I stood up and left the table, noting Hal’s frown and the way his head tracked me as I left. When I had entered the house I had made a point of pretending I needed to use the bathroom, so I knew already where it was. I locked the door behind me and sank down onto the lid of the toilet, cradling my head in my hands. I was disappointed in myself and in my subterfuge abilities. It seemed thirty-four years of caution paled in comparison to the temptation of being myself for one night. That did not really explain why I was trembling, or why my eyes were wet, but as was my custom I allowed myself the single luxury of refusing to examine my emotions.

At length there was a quiet knock on the door, and I froze mid-sob. “Eustace,” said Quigley Quagmire’s gentle voice. “Are you all right in there?”

“Yes,” I said, aware that I did not sound all right in the least.

“May I come in?” he asked.

As I’m sure you know, it is extremely unusual to ask to come into a bathroom when someone else is using it, no matter whether they are using the toilet, taking a bath, or trying to escape from a dinner party. “I would prefer that you didn’t,” I said.

“It is my bathroom.”

Without another word I stood up and unlocked the door, and after a moment it opened. I heard Quigley enter and close it again, although I could not bring myself to look up at him. “What’s wrong?” he asked, sitting down on the small rug in front of the sink. “Do you not enjoy parties?”

“I think I may enjoy parties too much,” I whispered. “I should not have come. It is too dangerous.”

“You are safe here, Mr. Snicket. You are among friends. They find you interesting and likeable, and although they have known you for only a few hours they would each defend you as one of our own—which you are, even if they don’t know it.”

“I am not one of their own. I do not belong to V.F.D., in that not a single one of its members knows I am alive. No-one can be allowed to know. It would place the Baudelaires in terrible danger.”

“My siblings and I already know.” When I glanced at him he was looking pensively down at his folded hands. “We helped them track you down. I wanted to find Jacques’ brother nearly as much as Beatrice wanted to find her uncle. And I don’t believe your presence puts us in significantly more danger than we are already in.”

“If you are interested,” I said stiffly, “I have compiled a statistical ledger tracking death rates among volunteers as a whole compared to death rates among my close associates. It is up to date, and I have the figures memorized. I think about them often.”

Quigley gave me a sad smile. “What I mean is that we are already in a great deal of danger. We are wanted for being ourselves. Unless your objection is that it will be easier to find you if you live in a single place, I wouldn’t worry about it.”

None of the three elder Baudelaires had mentioned this to me, although it would have been easy enough to find a moment to talk to me without Beatrice present. They were trying to protect me as if I was a child, even though I was old enough to be their father. Could have been their father, if things were a little different. I had since decided that it was for the best that I wasn’t.

“If next week Eustace d’Alleman has moved on,” said Quigley, “and the Baudelaires have a guest named Lemony Snicket, I don’t think anyone here would remark on it. Your brother told me that the two of you have spent plenty of time in the mansion at Winnipeg. The duchess would be glad to see you again.”

“Don’t be afraid,” I muttered to myself, suddenly struck by the words and needing to hear them out loud. “The blood has already seeped down into the earth; and there where it spilled, clusters of grapes are growing.”

“They are indeed,” said Quigley. “What is that from?”

“A book about the terror and absurdity of a life governed by rules you cannot change or understand,” I replied, and stood up. “The only thing to be done is to revel in it. I have a few apologies to make.”

 

Despite my new resolve, I was still very anxious for the evening to be over, and relieved when we returned to the house I now thought of as the last safe place for me. I pled exhaustion, which was true, and retreated to my room to soothe myself by sorting through my suitcase to make sure I had everything I needed to escape in the dead of night if necessary.

Early the next morning when I went to find some coffee to soothe my nerves, I found Violet in the process of leaving for her site visit. “You’re up early,” she said. She was checking her luggage, much as I had last night. “There’s coffee in the pot. It’s still warm, because I made it only a few minutes ago.”

I thanked her and sat behind the counter, watching her without appearing to watch her as I had been trained to do.

“I’ll be back early Monday morning if all goes well,” she said.

“And if it doesn’t?”

She looked up at me with a serious expression on her face, and once again I found myself intimidated by her. “Then Beatrice will need all the guardians she can get.” I was too shocked and disturbed to make a reply, and by the time the front door closed it was too late to ask how likely it was that things would not go well.

If this were _A Series of Unfortunate Events_ , this would be the point where I would pause and tell you that I wished I could have prevented Violet from going out that door because all would not go well, as it so seldom had. I would tell you that the moment the door closed was the moment that started a cascade of awfulness that would ruin the lives of the Baudelaires and leave me weeping in a dumpster as I hid from a very wicked woman.

But this is not _A Series of Unfortunate Events_ , and so I can tell you that Violet was fine. She would return early Monday morning with gifts for her family members, and a very thoughtful gift for me as well, which much later I would realize meant she counted me among them. I can tell you that I made some very serviceable blueberry pancakes with sour cream and blueberry preserve, which Sunny complimented when she came down the stairs for breakfast. I can tell you that the second batch of pancakes was noticeably more delicious as Sunny taught me her subtly amended pancake recipe. And I can tell you that in memory of my brother, the only member of my family who had actually observed Shabbat, I spent most of the day reading collected parshanut and teaching Klaus and Beatrice the code I was using to take notes. It felt like an indulgence to remember him, but it felt necessary to study what I could while I had the chance.

That weekend was the least stressful weekend I had experienced in many, many years. It was so stress-free that it made me a little anxious, but only a little. Klaus was interested in comparing note-taking strategies, and it became something of a game to see how our notes differed after reading the same passages. More often than not we could hear Sunny and Beatrice talking and laughing in the kitchen or in the back garden where crocuses were just beginning to open. No-one mentioned the covert organization of which all but one of us were members. On Sunday all four of us accompanied Klaus to the public library at which he volunteered.

On a similar Sunday many, many years ago, I had sat in a different library with Klaus and Sunny’s parents listening to Tito Puente on an old but very well-cared-for gramophone. None of us spoke very good Spanish, so we had spent the better part of an hour quoting ‘Too Marvelous for Words’ at each other. It took me a very long time to realize that my heart had fluttered just as much when Bertrand told me solemnly that I was too much to be in Webster’s dictionary as when Beatrice tried to restrain her laughter as she called me glorious, glamorous, and that old standby amorous. At the time I thought the feeling was some type of jealousy, and I understood far too late that I was more than a little in love with both of them. The only relevant information you should take from this anecdote, however, is that they had passed on their love of Tito Puente to their children. I now spoke much better Spanish, as did Sunny, though when we taught my niece the words to one of my favorite songs we had no idea that she would go on to become a trilingual ambassador for our organization in Latin America. On that day Beatrice Snicket was a laughing child who would soon be seven years old.

I stayed home during that week’s Friday night dinner, because I thought I should get used to having a home to stay home in before I visited the homes of others. Violet told me that Quigley had been very disappointed not to see me there, and presumably so had the Duchess. Once again while I was alone in the house I had had the urge to flee, but it was no longer as overpowering as it had been that first day. If this were _A Series of Unfortunate Events_ , I would tell you now that I should have nurtured my paranoia instead of optimistically beginning to set it aside—but it is not. I was right to relax.

The week after that I went with the Baudelaires to the home of two siblings that was unsurprisingly furnished and decorated as if it were a submarine. Most of the other guests were polite enough to pretend that Lemony Snicket had not been dead for twenty-four years, except the Duchess, who slapped me and then kissed me angrily on the mouth. I spent the night sitting between her and Quigley while half the guests in attendance listened to her interrogating me on my whereabouts since the last time I had faked my death and why I had done such a thing to her, personally.

Several hours after sunset she pulled me out to the front porch and pressed her hand over mine so tightly it was like she was trying to make sure I would not escape. “You seem happier, L.,” she murmured.

“I am… more than I could have predicted. I hope that you are happy as well, R.”

“It is sometimes difficult to be happy,” she said, lifting her head to look up at the stars, partially obscured by clouds. “So many good people have died. Very few of our contemporaries are left alive. That is one of the reasons I am so angry with you.”

“For a long time I have thought it would be better if I died,” I said, and joined her in watching the stars. “Don’t worry. I have something to live for now.”

“Something besides schemes and secret codes,” said the Duchess, sounding satisfied. “You will be visiting me this week for tea. Please choose whichever day is most suitable for you. I hear you have a party to plan, so I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you.”

“Do I? That’s news to me.”

“It’s almost Pesach. A time for new beginnings.”

“Escape from peril.”

“Precisely,” said the Duchess. She smiled at me, and then up at the sky. “A time to be grateful for what we have, even though so much has been lost.”

“A time to pretend we do not enjoy the bread of affliction when in fact we are inventing new and delicious varieties of hummus to eat with it.”

“And you’d better bring some to tea, too.”

I did bring new and delicious varieties of hummus to the Duchess’ mansion, with Sunny’s help. I also helped Klaus refine his Haggadah—a word which here means “collection of writings and songs about social responsibility and the exodus from Egypt that will take far too long to read until everyone is hungry and impatient”—which he and Violet had cobbled together from vague memories of childhood seders. I helped to bring three large tables into the back garden and hang lanterns from the trees. I bought a live carp from the marketplace, insisted on keeping it in the bathtub because it was a tradition, and then refused to use it to make a traditional dish that I didn’t happen to like very much. I watched Violet’s steady hands light candles in candlesticks that had been salvaged from the fire that killed two people I had loved very much. I drank four glasses of the weakest and most unpleasant wine I could find, because I did not want to be inebriated. Nevertheless I was inebriated enough to lend my voice to several songs of thanks, a rather disturbing song about a goat, and a short toast that had only four words.

If someone says to you, “Next year in Jerusalem,” they may be reminding you of an appointment to meet them in the capital city of Israel. But not everyone who says it actually intends to go to Jerusalem, and there are many reasons not to—political, financial, and secretive. In this case when we all raised our glasses and said “Next year in Jerusalem” together, we were referring to Jerusalem in the ancient tradition as a place of freedom and safety, acknowledging the longing of the heroes of our story for a home, and their satisfaction at finally finding one. Even if you do not believe you will celebrate Pesach next year in Jerusalem, you may say these worlds and think of your own home, which I hope is one of freedom and safety, and the journeys of all the people in the world, which are often difficult and treacherous, as they try to find homes for themselves. At a seder I had attended the previous year, during which I had snuck out of a bathroom window to avoid being seen by someone who might recognize me and alert my enemies, I might have said “Next year in Jerusalem” in a weary and sarcastic way to indicate that I did not believe I would be safer and happier next year, or that I would find a home. But this year, against all expectation, I had found those things. The seder was almost over, and I did not foresee having to sneak out of it. All I foresaw was my niece and the other children hunting for an improbably valuable cracker, and possibly another few glasses of wine.

And for once, I was right.

**Author's Note:**

> I lied about not explaining any references other than the title, it would be irresponsible not to mention that part of the last paragraph was [cribbed from the illustrious Mr. Snicket himself.](http://thesnicketfile.tumblr.com/post/110557038806/lemony-snickets-commentary-in-the-new-american)


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